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Architecture competitions for UD: codes or innovation?

How juries assess universal design in architectural school competitions is critical to the level of innovation that can be expected. Leif D. Houck of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences gives an excellent analysis of how competitions are run today and how they can be improved for the future. Unlike most papers on universal design Houck does not refer to the classic seven principles – he refers to the updated work of Steinfeld and Maisel. The following excerpt from the introductory section provides a good overview and direction of the discussion in the article. We would do well to take up the recommendations here in Australia.

“The very reason to organize an architectural competition is to achieve maximum quality in a project. The idea is not to have a competition to see if anyone manages to comply the regulations, building codes and the competition brief. No, the idea is to achieve qualities beyond the regulations. An architectural competition will most likely result in different designs and solution – with different qualities. Additionally, a project’s development from developing the building program until the building stage contains stages in which the project is in process and will (hopefully) be improved. Lid’s approach to look at Universal Design at different levels from strategic to instrumental, is useful in the discussion of what level Universal Design should be solved in architectural competitions. Which challenges should be solved in the competition stage, and which challenges can be solved in the development of the winner project.”

This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-684-2-229